“I don’t do small talk,” Anderson said. She pushed her glasses up her nose. “You want something?”
“Need to talk to you. Confidentially.”
“Good. I’m bored,” she said. “You want an iced tea?”
“Thank you anyway—”
“Lemonade?”
“I could take a lemonade,” Virgil said.
“Sit there,” she said, pointing him at a garden table. She hung her cane on the back of one of the garden chairs, went in the house, and came back carrying two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade. She poured the glasses two-thirds full and pushed one toward Virgil.
He picked it up, took a drink. “Good,” he said. “Homemade?”
“Yes, inasmuch as I made it in my home, with a can of Birds Eye frozen lemonade.”
“Okay,” Virgil said. “I got a trustworthy vibration from you the other day, and I need to ask a somewhat, mmm, sensitive question.”
“Stop beating around the bush and ask the question.”
Virgil nodded. “A brief preface. I had a guy who I was going to squeeze like a ball of Silly Putty. Buster Gedney. But early this morning Buster ran for it. Loaded a good part of his machine shop into his truck, apparently, and headed out. I’ve got people looking for him in four states, but he could be damn near to Missouri or Nebraska or Ohio by now, and if he drives all night, he could be anywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies by tomorrow morning.”
“You might not find him, then.”
“Having spoken to Buster, I think we’ve got a chance,” Virgil said. “But you can’t tell, and I’ve got two dead people on my hands. I’ve got an idea of who might’ve done it, but no proof. Here’s my question: If you assume that a good part of the school board and school administration is in on this, who’d be most likely to crack under pressure?”
“Hmm.” She took a sip of the lemonade, grimaced, stared at the sky over the roof of the neighbor’s house, and finally said, “Wouldn’t be Jennifer Gedney, she’s a pretty tough nut. I guess I’d go after Henry Hetfield, he’s the school superintendent. He’d almost have to be in on it. He’s a fussy old woman, and the idea of prison would terrify him. In fact, you’d have to be careful. He could wind up jumping off his workbench with a rope around his neck, or choking down a bottle of sleeping pills.”
“Can’t have that,” Virgil said.
“Okay. Well, there’s the auditor, Fred Masilla. He’d have to be in on it, too, but he’s pretty soft-looking. Soft-talking.”
“Okay.”
“You know who could really answer this question, is Vike Laughton. He covers the school board.”
“That would not be a good idea,” Virgil said.
Her eyebrows went up. “Really. Vike?”
“I have no proof, but Conley thought so.”
She took another sip of lemonade, then said, “You want to know the thing about this part of Minnesota?”
“Sure.”
“We’re isolated. We’re out in the sticks. There’s no other big town anywhere near here. I mean, La Crosse, but that’s on the other side of the river, and it’s a good long drive over there. Caledonia’s a bit closer, but it’s still a long way. We’re down here by ourselves, and we get to thinking that we really are by ourselves. The people who are stealing this money from the schools, it probably never occurred to them that an outsider might take an interest in what they’re doing. And insiders, people who live here, can be managed — they can be ignored, like me, with my silly campaign for art and music classes, or they can be bought off. The schools spend a lot of money, millions of dollars, and most of it they spend right here. Nobody but an outsider would want to get crosswise with them. We’d never say that out loud, not even to each other, but that’s the fact.”
“Can’t have people getting shot in the back,” Virgil said.
“Of course not — but keep in mind that they were both outsiders. They don’t really count for so much.” They sat without speaking for a while, then she added, “You know how much a house costs here?”
“No idea.”
“You could get a very nice dry lot on the river, with a dock, three or four acres, big modern house, excellent condition… for maybe four hundred thousand. I saw one like that last spring. You could get a house in town, an ordinary house, for a hundred.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. The point is, whatever these people have been stealing has probably been making them rich in Trippton terms. In this town, two schoolteachers married to each other are rich… so the money won’t have to be big. Not in New York terms, or Minneapolis terms, anyway.”
“Henry Hetfield.”
“He’s the one I’d go after.” She looked at a small gold watch that she wore as a locket. “You’re a little late in the day — he’ll be gone. He only works until three o’clock, and sometimes not even that, in the summer.”
“Does he live here?”
“Yes, he does. I’ll get a pencil and paper and draw you a map of where he lives.”
When Virgil got back to his truck, he sat and thought about it for a minute, but in the end decided that Hetfield would have to wait until morning. He needed to do some research on him, talk to Johnson Johnson, look again at Conley’s notes, see where Hetfield fit in. He’d seen Hetfield’s name in the notes, now he wanted to nail down what Conley thought about him.
He put the car in gear and drove back to the cabin; on the way he called Johnson and told him they needed to hook up again, at least for a few minutes.
“I think I might have been an alcoholic,” Johnson told him, on the phone. “Two days without a drink and I feel like somebody put a vise on my neck. The thing is, when I was drinking, I was a hell of a nice guy — ask anyone. Now I’m not sure I’m so nice anymore.”
Virgil didn’t want to say it, because he really wanted Johnson to stop, but the opening was too tempting. “Don’t worry, Johnson. Everybody thought you were an asshole. The change is all in your mind.”
14
While Virgil was at Janice Anderson’s house, Jennifer Gedney was using the only remaining pay phone in Trippton, the one at the back of the drugstore, to call Jennifer Barns, the chairwoman of the school board. “We need a meeting and it’s urgent. We need to talk about personnel matters and budgetary questions.”
Barns asked, “How urgent?”
“Very.” Gedney looked around, half-expecting to see Virgil lurking behind the greeting-card rack.
“Is this a DefCon One?”
“No, but it’s a two,” Gedney said. “Maybe going to one.”
“Oh, shit. Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“At my house tonight at nine o’clock,” Jennifer 1 said.
“You’ll have to call everybody — I’m afraid to use my cell,” Gedney said.
“That bad?”
“Yes.”
At ten after nine, Gedney parked her car on a side street, a block away and around the corner from Jennifer Barns’s house. She collected her purse and got out under a starlit sky, stood for a minute, decided it might get chilly, got her sweater from the passenger seat, and slipped it over her shoulders.
She was deliberately late, waiting to see if the arrival of the others stirred any interest from… anybody. Other than familiar cars being parked on the street by Jennifer 1’s, she’d seen nothing unusual.
She’d started to walk to Jennifer 1’s when her cell phone chimed, and she looked at it: a text message. WRU?
She texted back: 1 min.
When she arrived, they were all waiting, some looking skeptical, some scared, a couple just curious. Jennifer 1 had provided a couple bottles of white wine, and everyone but Jennifer 2, a recovering alcoholic, had a glass. She could smell the fear rolling off them.